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The American dream can be yours, but not if you're born in the South

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Regional economic mobility as charted by a recent study of American incomes. Children born in places shown more red on the map have a lower chance of moving up in economic class later in life.
(Study: The Economic Impacts of Tax Expenditures Evidence from Spatial Variation Across the U.S.)

America is often called the land of opportunity, and many consider one of the nation's strongest attributes to be the widespread access it provides its citizens to the so-called American dream.

A new study says poor children in the South don't have the same access to that dream.

In some U.S. cities, a child that grows up poor has a 1 in 10 chance of becoming rich. According to a study conducted jointly by Harvard and UC-Berkeley economists, children who grow up poor in Boston, New York, or Los Angeles have a roughly 10 percent chance of earning $70,000 by age 30.

The odds are much lower, however, for children who grow up poor in the South. In Atlanta, poor children have just a 4 percent chance at becoming rich later in life, based on longitudinal income data considered for the study.

In Birmingham, poor children have a 5.5 percent chance at becoming rich later. In the Montgomery area, the percentage chance is 3.9.

The study charted the incomes of millions of anonymized study subjects to reach its conclusions.

“Where you grow up matters,” Harvard economist and study co-author Nathaniel Hendren told the New York Times. “There is tremendous variation across the U.S. in the extent to which kids can rise out of poverty.”

The fact that southern states tend to see lower incomes does not explain away the differences. Residents in Atlanta and Seattle earn similar average incomes, but income mobility in Seattle is more than twice as great, according to the study.

Instead, what the study found was more important were factors like the number of two-parent households in an area, and the degree of civic engagement (memberships in religious and/or community groups).